Nine out of 10 people in Edward Snowden's NSA intercepts were not targets

Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani

Washington: Ordinary internet users far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from US digital networks.

Nine out of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided to The Washington Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to US citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimised", more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but nearly 900 additional email addresses were found unmasked in the files, which could be strongly linked to US citizens or residents.

There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages – but also collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

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Among the most valuable contents – which the Post did not describe in detail, to avoid harm to continuing operations – are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture of Pakistan-based bomb maker Muhammad Tahir Shahzad and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have an intimate quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

About 160,000 intercepted email and instant message conversations were reviewed, along with 7900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.

The material spans US President Barack Obama's first term, a period of exponential growth for the NSA's domestic collection.

There are many ways to be swept up incidentally in surveillance aimed at a valid foreign target. Some of those in the Snowden archive were monitored because they interacted directly with a target, but others had more tenuous links.

If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply "lurked", reading passively what other people wrote.

"One target, 38 others on there," one analyst wrote. She collected data on them all.

In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people.

The Obama administration declines to discuss the scale of incidental collection. The NSA has asserted that it is unable to make any estimate, even in classified form, of the number of Americans swept in.

US intelligence officials declined to confirm or deny in general terms the authenticity of the intercepted content provided by Mr Snowden.